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 CONTENTS

p r e fac e xiii
ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts xv
introduction: Sex and Gender through the Prism of Difference 1
*Denotes a reading new to this edition.
PA R T I PERSPECTIVES ON SEX, GENDER, AND DIFFERENCE 13

1. Anne Fausto-Sterling, The Five Sexes,

Revisited 1 7
2. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton
Dill, Theorizing Difference from Multiracial
Feminism 2 2
*3. Stephanie A. Shields, Gender: An Intersectionality
Perspective 29
4. Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities and
Globalization 3 7
*5. Bandana Purkayastha, Intersectionality in a
Transnational World 50

PA R T I I BODIES 57

6. Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt, Doing Gender,

Determining Gender: Transgender People, Gender
Panics, and the Maintenance of the Sex/Gender/
Sexuality System 61
*7. Georgiann Davis, Medical Jurisdiction
and the Intersex Body 77
vii
viii contents

8. Betsy Lucal, What It Means to Be Gendered Me: Life

on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender
System 9 2
9. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Yearning for Lightness:
Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and
Consumption of Skin Lighteners 102
*10 . Heidi Safia Mirza, “A Second Skin”: Embodied
Intersectionality, Transnationalism, and
Narratives of Identity and Belonging among
Muslim Women in Britain 117

PA R T I I I . SEXUALITIES AND DESIRES 131

11. Rashawn Ray and Jason A. Rosow, Getting Off and

Getting Intimate: How Normative Institutional
Arrangements Structure Black and White Fraternity
Men’s Approaches toward Women 133
*12. Karen Pyke, An Intersectional Approach to Resistance
and Complicity: The Case of Racialised Desire
among Asian American Women 150
13. Jane Ward, Dude-Sex: White Masculinities and
“Authentic” Heterosexuality among Dudes Who
Have Sex with Dudes 160
*14. Hector Carrillo and Jorge Fontdevila, Border
Crossings and Shifting Sexualities among
Mexican Gay Immigrant Men: Beyond Monolithic
Conceptions 1 7 2
15. Kirsty Liddiard, The Work of Disabled Identities in
Intimate Relationships 184

PA R T I V. IDENTITIES 193

16. B. Deutsch, The Male Privilege Checklist: An

Unabashed Imitation of an Article by Peggy
McIntosh 1 9 5
17. Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women
Redefining Difference 198
18. Tristan Bridges and C. J. Pascoe, Hybrid Masculinities:
New Directions in the Sociology of Men and
Masculinities 20 4
 Contents ix

19. Sanyu A. Mojola, Providing Women, Kept Men: Doing

Masculinity in the Wake of the African HIV/AIDS
Pandemic 21 7
*20. Joelle Ruby Ryan, From Transgender to Trans*: The
Ongoing Struggle for Inclusion, Acceptance, and
Celebration of Identities beyond the Binary 231
*21. Aída Hurtado and Minal Sinha, More Than Men: Latino
Feminist Masculinities and Intersectionality 241

PA R T V. FA M I L I E S 253

22 Patricia Hill Collins, The Meaning of Motherhood

in Black Culture and Black Mother–Daughter
Relationships 2 5 7
23. Lisa J. Udel, Revision and Resistance: The Politics of
Native Women’s Motherwork 268
*24. Roberta Espinoza, The Good Daughter Dilemma:
Latinas Managing Family and School Demands 282
25. Stephanie Coontz, Why Gender Equality Stalled 292
26. Michael A. Messner and Suzel Bozada-Deas, Separating
the Men from the Moms: The Making of Adult
Gender Segregation in Youth Sports 296
27. Kathryn Edin, What Do Low-Income Single Mothers
Say about Marriage? 310
*28. Nicole Civettini, Housework as Non-Normative Gender
Display among Lesbians and Gay Men 328
*29. Emir Estrada and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo,
Intersectional Dignities: Latino Immigrant Street
Vendor Youth in Los Angeles 344

PA R T V I . C O N S T R U C T I N G G E N D E R I N T H E W O R K P L A C E A N D
T H E L A B O R M A R K E T 361

30. Christine L. Williams, The Glass Escalator, Revisited:

Gender Inequality in Neoliberal Times, SWS
Feminist Lecturer 365
31. Amy M. Denissen and Abigail C. Saguy, Gendered
Homophobia and the Contradictions of Workplace
Discrimination for Women in the Building
Trades 3 7 8
x contents

32. Adia Harvey Wingfield, The Modern Mammy and the

Angry Black Man: African American Professionals’
Experiences with Gendered Racism in the
Workplace 3 90
33. Miliann Kang, “I Just Put Koreans and
Nails Together”: Nail Spas and the Model
Minority 4 01
*34. Rebecca Glauber, Race and Gender in Families and at
Work: The Fatherhood Wage Premium 415
*35. Stephanie J. Nawyn and Linda Gjokaj, The Magnifying
Effect of Privilege: Earnings Inequalities at the
Intersection of Gender, Race, and Nativity 428

PA R T V I I . E D U C AT I O N A N D S C H O O L S 443

36. Ann Arnett Ferguson, Naughty by Nature 445

*37. Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Laura T. Hamilton, and
Elizabeth M. Armstrong, and J. Lotus Seeley, Good
Girls: Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on
Campus 4 5 3
*38. Dolores Delgado Bernal, Learning and Living
Pedagogies of the Home: The Mestiza
Consciousness of Chicana Students 469

PA R T V I I I . VIOLENCE 483

39. Cecilia Menjívar, A Framework for Examining

Violence 4 8 5
40. Victor M. Rios, The Consequences of the
Criminal Justice Pipeline on Black and Latino
Masculinity 501
*41. Natalie J. Sokoloff and Susan C. Pearce, Intersections,
Immigration, and Partner Violence: A View from a
New Gateway—Baltimore, Maryland 509
*42. Roe Bubar and Pamela Jumper Thurman, Violence
against Native Women 518

PA R T I X . CHANGE AND POLITICS 531

43. Kevin Powell, Confessions of a Recovering

Misogynist 53 3
 Contents xi

44. Dorothy Roberts and Sujatha Jesudason, Movement

Intersectionality: The Case of Race, Gender,
Disability, and Genetic Technologies 538
*45. Maylei Blackwell, Líderes Campesinas: Nepantla
Strategies and Grassroots Organizing at the
Intersection of Gender and Globalization 551
*46. Sarah Jaffe, The Collective Power of #MeToo 573

glossary 579
references 585
 PREFACE

O ver the past forty years, texts and readers intended for use in women’s studies and
gender studies courses have changed and developed in important ways. In the 1970s
and into the early 1980s, many courses and texts focused almost exclusively on women as a
relatively undifferentiated category. Two developments have broadened the study of women.
First, in response to criticisms by women of color and by lesbians that heterosexual, white,
middle-class feminists had tended to “falsely universalize” their own experiences and issues,
courses and texts on gender began in the 1980s to systematically incorporate race and class
diversity. And simultaneously, as a result of feminist scholars’ insistence that gender be stud-
ied as a relational construct, more concrete studies of men and masculinity began to emerge
in the 1980s.
This book reflects this belief that race, class, and sexual diversity among women and
men should be central to the study of gender. But this collection adds an important new
dimension that will broaden the frame of gender studies. By including some articles that
are based on research in nations connected to the United States through globalization,
tourism, and labor migrations, we hope that Gender through the Prism of Difference will
contribute to a transcendence of the often myopic, US-based, and Eurocentric focus on
the study of sex and gender. The inclusion of these perspectives is not simply useful for
illuminating our own cultural blind spots; it also begins to demonstrate how, early in the
twenty-first century, gender relations are increasingly centrally implicated in current pro-
cesses of globalization.

NEW TO THIS EDITION

Because the amount of high-quality research on gender has expanded so dramatically in

the past decade, the most difficult task in assembling this collection was deciding what to
include. The sixth edition, while retaining the structure of the previous edition, is different
and improved. This edition includes nineteen new articles and discusses material on gender

xiii
xiv preface

issues relevant to the college-age generation, including several articles on college students as
well as the contemporary #MeToo social movement. We have also included articles on trans-
gender identities and public policies, additional chapters on Native and Muslim women,
policing and incarceration, the intersection of gender and immigration, and gender and dis-
abilities. Our focus for selecting chapters is to include readings that cover important topics
that are most accessible for students, while keeping the cost of the volume down.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W e thank faculty and staff colleagues in the Department of Sociology and the Gender
Studies program at the University of Southern California, and the Department of So-
ciology and the Center for Gender in Global Context at Michigan State University for their
generous support and assistance. Other people contributed their labor to the d
­ evelopment of
this book. We are grateful to Amy Holzgang, Cerritos College; Lauren ­McDonald, California
State University Northridge; and Linda Shaw, California State University San Marcos, for their
invaluable feedback and advice. We thank Heidi R. Lewis of Colorado College for her contri-
butions to the book’s ancillary program, available at www.oup-arc.com/bacazinn.
We acknowledge the helpful criticism and suggestions made by the following reviewers:
Erin K. Anderson, Washington College
Kathleen Cole, Metropolitan State University
Ted Coleman, California State University, San Bernardino
Keri Diggins, Scottsdale Community College
Emily Gaarder, University of Minnesota, Duluth
Robert B. Jenkot, Coastal Carolina University
Amanda Miller, University of Indianapolis
Carla Norris-Raynbird, Bemidji State University
Katie R. Peel, University of North Carolina Wilmington
Jaita Talukdar, Loyola University New Orleans
Billy James Ulibarrí, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Kate Webster, DePaul University
We also thank our editor at Oxford University Press, Sherith Pankratz, who has been
encouraging, helpful, and patient, and Grace Li for her assistance throughout the process.
We also thank Tony Mathias and Jennifer Sperber for their marketing assistance with the
book. We also thank Dr. Amy Denissen, whose contributions to the fifth edition of this
book laid invaluable groundwork for the current edition.

xv
xvi acknowledgments

Finally, we thank our families for their love and support as we worked on this book. Alan
Zinn, Prentice Zinn, Gabrielle Cobbs, and Edan Zinn provide inspiration through their work
for progressive social change. Miles Hondagneu-Messner and Sasha H ­ ondagneu-Messner
continually challenge the neatness of Mike and Pierrette’s image of social life. Richard
Hellinga was always ready to pick up slack on the home front, Henry Nawyn-Hellinga pro-
vided encouraging words at the least expected moments, and Zach Nawyn-Hellinga helped
Stephanie experience firsthand life on the borders of gender. We do hope that the kind of
work that is collected in this book will eventually help them and their generation make
sense of the world and move that world into more peaceful, humane, and just directions.
GENDER THROUGH THE PRISM OF DIFFERENCE
 INTRODUCTION

sex and gender through the prism of difference

“Men can’t cry.” “Women are victims of patriarchal oppression.” “After divorces, single moth-
ers are downwardly mobile, often moving into poverty.” “Men don’t do their share of house-
work and child care.” “Professional women face barriers such as sexual harassment and a
‘glass ceiling’ that prevent them from competing equally with men for high-status positions
and high salaries.” “Heterosexual intercourse is an expression of men’s power over women.”
Sometimes, the students in our sociology and gender studies courses balk at these kinds of
generalizations. And they are right to do so. After all, some men are more emotionally expres-
sive than some women, some women have more power and success than some men, some
men do their share—or more—of housework and child care, and some women experience sex
with men as both pleasurable and empowering. Indeed, contemporary gender relations are
complex and changing in various directions, and as such, we need to be wary of simplistic, if
handy, slogans that seem to sum up the essence of relations between women and men.
On the other hand, we think it is a tremendous mistake to conclude that “all individuals
are totally unique and different,” and that therefore all generalizations about social groups are
impossible or inherently oppressive. In fact, we are convinced that it is this very complexity,
this multifaceted nature of contemporary gender relations, that fairly begs for a sociological
analysis of gender. In the title of this book, we use the image of “the prism of difference” to
illustrate our approach to developing this sociological perspective on contemporary gender
relations. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “prism,” in part, as “a homogeneous trans-
parent solid, usually with triangular bases and rectangular sides, used to produce or analyze a
continuous spectrum.” Imagine a ray of light—which to the naked eye appears to be only one
color—refracted through a prism onto a white wall. To the eye, the result is not an infinite,
disorganized scatter of individual colors. Rather, the refracted light displays an order, a struc-
ture of relationships among the different colors—a rainbow. Similarly, we propose to use the
prism of difference in this book to analyze a continuous spectrum of people to show how
gender is organized and experienced differently when refracted through the prism of sexual,
racial-ethnic, social class, ability, age, and national citizenship differences.
1
2 gender through the prism of difference

e a r ly w o m e n ’ s s t u d i e s : c at e g o r i c a l v i e w s o f “women” and “men”

Taken together, the articles in this book make the case that it is possible to make good
generalizations about women and men. But these generalizations should be drawn care-
fully, by always asking the questions “which women?” and “which men?” Scholars of sex
and gender have not always done this. In the 1960s and 1970s, women’s studies focused
on the differences between women and men rather than among women and men. The very
concept of gender, women’s studies scholars demonstrated, is based on socially defined
difference between women and men. From the macro level of social institutions such
as the economy, politics, and religion to the micro level of interpersonal relations, dis-
tinctions between women and men structure social relations. Making men and women
­different from one another is the essence of gender. It is also the basis of men’s power and
domination. Understanding this was profoundly illuminating. Knowing that difference
produced domination enabled women to name, analyze, and set about changing their
victimization.
In the 1970s, riding the wave of a resurgent feminist movement, colleges and universities
began to develop women’s studies courses that aimed first and foremost to make women’s
lives visible. The texts that were developed for these courses tended to stress the things that
women shared under patriarchy—having the responsibility for housework and child care,
the experience or fear of men’s sexual violence, a lack of formal or informal access to educa-
tion, and exclusion from high-status professional and managerial jobs, political office, and
religious leadership positions (Brownmiller 1975; Kanter 1977).
The study of women in society offered new ways of seeing the world. But the 1970s ap-
proach was limited in several ways. Thinking of gender primarily in terms of differences be-
tween women and men led scholars to overgeneralize about both. The concept of patriarchy
led to a dualistic perspective of male privilege and female subordination. Women and men
were cast as opposites. Each was treated as a homogeneous category with common charac-
teristics and experiences. This approach essentialized women and men. Essentialism, simply
put, is the notion that women’s and men’s attributes and indeed women and men them-
selves are categorically different. From this perspective, male control and coercion of women
produced conflict between the sexes. The feminist insight originally introduced by Simone
de Beauvoir in 1953—that women, as a group, had been socially defined as the “other” and
that men had constructed themselves as the subjects of history, while constructing women
as their objects—fueled an energizing sense of togetherness among many women. As col-
lege students read books such as Sisterhood Is Powerful (Morgan 1970), many of them joined
organizations that fought—with some success—for equality and justice for women.

the voices of “other” women

Although this view of women as an oppressed “other” was empowering for certain groups of
women, some women began to claim that the feminist view of universal sisterhood ignored
and marginalized their major concerns. It soon became apparent that treating women as
a group united in its victimization by patriarchy was biased by too narrow a focus on the
experiences and perspectives of women from more privileged social groups. “Gender” was
 Introduction 3

treated as a generic category, uncritically applied to women. Ironically, this analysis, which
was meant to unify women, instead produced divisions between and among them. The
concerns projected as “universal” were removed from the realities of many women’s lives.
For example, it became a matter of faith in second-wave feminism that women’s liberation
would be accomplished by breaking down the “gendered public-domestic split.” Indeed,
the feminist call for women to move out of the kitchen and into the workplace resonated
in the experiences of many of the college-educated white women who were inspired by
Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. But the idea that women’s movement
into workplaces was itself empowering or liberating seemed absurd or irrelevant to many
working-class women and women of color. They were already working for wages, as had
many of their mothers and grandmothers, and did not consider access to jobs and public
life “liberating.” For many of these women, liberation had more to do with organizing in
communities and workplaces—often alongside men—for better schools, better pay, decent
benefits, and other policies to benefit their neighborhoods, jobs, and families. The feminism
of the 1970s did not seem to address these issues.
As more and more women analyzed their own experiences, they began to address the
power relations that created differences among women and the part that privileged women
played in the oppression of others. For many women of color, working-class women, lesbi-
ans, and women in contexts outside the United States (especially women in non-Western
societies), the focus on male domination was a distraction from other oppressions. Their
lived experiences could support neither a unitary theory of gender nor an ideology of univer-
sal sisterhood. As a result, finding common ground in a universal female victimization was
never a priority for many groups of women.
Challenges to gender stereotypes soon emerged. Women of varied races, classes, national
origins, and sexualities insisted that the concept of gender be broadened to take their differ-
ences into account (Baca Zinn et al. 1986; Hartmann 1976; Rich 1980; Smith 1977). Many
women began to argue that their lives were affected by their location in a number of dif-
ferent hierarchies: in the United States as African Americans, Latinas, Native Americans, or
Asian Americans in the race hierarchy; as young or old in the age hierarchy; as heterosexual,
lesbian, bisexual, or queer in the sexual orientation hierarchy; and as women outside the
Western industrialized nations, in subordinated geopolitical contexts. Books like Cherríe
Moraga’s and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981) described the experiences
of women living at the intersections of multiple oppressions, challenging the notion of a
monolithic “woman’s experience.” Stories from women at these intersections made it clear
that women were not victimized by gender alone but by the historical and systematic denial
of rights and privileges based on other differences as well.

men as gendered beings

As the voices of “other” women in the mid- to late 1970s began to challenge and expand
the parameters of women’s studies, a new area of scholarly inquiry was beginning to stir—a
critical examination of men and masculinity. To be sure, in those early years of gender stud-
ies, the major task was to conduct studies and develop courses about the lives of women to
4 gender through the prism of difference

begin to correct centuries of scholarship that rendered invisible women’s lives, problems,
and accomplishments. But the core idea of feminism—that “femininity” and women’s sub-
ordination is a social construction—logically led to an examination of the social construc-
tion of “masculinity” and men’s power. Many of the first scholars to take on this task were
psychologists who were concerned with looking at the social construction of “the male sex
role” (e.g., Pleck 1976). By the late 1980s, there was a growing interdisciplinary collection of
studies of men and masculinity, much of it by social scientists (Brod 1987; Kaufman 1987;
Kimmel 1987; Kimmel and Messner 1989).
Reflecting developments in women’s studies, the scholarship on men’s lives tended to
develop three themes: First, what we think of as “masculinity” is not a fixed, biological es-
sence of men, but rather is a social construction that shifts and changes over time as well
as between and among various national and cultural contexts. Second, power is central to
understanding gender as a relational construct, and the dominant definition of masculin-
ity is largely about expressing difference from—and superiority over—anything considered
“feminine.” And third, there is no singular “male sex role.” Rather, at any given time there are
various masculinities. R. W. Connell (1987, 1995, 2002) has been among the most articulate
advocates of this perspective. Connell argues that hegemonic masculinity (the dominant
and most privileged form of masculinity at any given moment) is constructed in relation to
femininities as well as in relation to various subordinated or marginalized masculinities. For
example, in the United States, various racialized masculinities (e.g., as represented by African
American men, Latino immigrant men, etc.) have been central to the construction of hege-
monic (white middle-class) masculinity. This “othering” of racialized masculinities, as well
as their selective incorporation by dominant groups (Bridges and Pascoe in this volume),
helps to shore up the privileges that have been historically connected to hegemonic mascu-
linity. When viewed this way, we can better understand hegemonic masculinity as part of a
system that includes gender as well as racial, class, sexual, and other relations of power.
The new literature on men and masculinities also begins to move us beyond the simplis-
tic, falsely categorical, and pessimistic view of men simply as a privileged sex class. When
race, social class, sexual orientation, physical abilities, immigrant, or national status are taken
into account, we can see that in some circumstances, “male privilege” is partly—sometimes
substantially—muted (Kimmel and Messner 2010; Kimmel in this volume). Although it is
unlikely that we will soon see a “men’s movement” that aims to undermine the power and
privileges that are connected with hegemonic masculinity, when we begin to look at “mas-
culinities” through the prism of difference, we can begin to see similarities and possible
points of coalition between and among certain groups of women and men (Messner 1998).
Certain kinds of changes in gender relations—for instance, a national family leave policy for
working parents—might serve as a means of uniting particular groups of women and men.

gender in global contexts

It is an increasingly accepted truism that late twentieth-century increases in transnational

trade, international migration, and global systems of production and communication have
diminished both the power of nation-states and the significance of national borders. A much
 Introduction 5

more ignored issue is the extent to which gender relations—in the United States and else-
where in the world—are increasingly linked to patterns of global economic restructuring.
Decisions made in corporate headquarters located in Los Angeles, Tokyo, or London may
have immediate repercussions on how people thousands of miles away organize their work,
community, and family lives (Sassen 1991). It is no longer possible to study gender relations
without giving attention to global processes and inequalities. Scholarship on women in de-
veloping countries has moved from liberal concerns for the impact of development policies
on women (Boserup 1970) to more critical perspectives that acknowledge how international
labor and capital mobility are transforming gender and family relations (Hondagneu-Sotelo
and Avila 1997; Mojola 2014). The transformation of international relations from a 1990s
“post–Cold War” environment to an expansion of militarism and warfare in recent years
has realigned international gender relations in key ways that call for new examinations of
gender, violence, militarism, and culture (Enloe 1993, 2000; Okin 1999). The now extended
US military presence in the Middle East has brought with it increasing numbers of female
troops and, with that, growing awareness of gender and sexual violence both by and within
the military.
Around the world, women’s paid and unpaid labor is key to global development strate-
gies. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that gender is molded from the “top down.”
What happens on a daily basis in families and workplaces simultaneously constitutes and
is constrained by structural transnational institutions. For instance, in the second half of
the twentieth century young, single women, many of them from poor rural areas, were
(and continue to be) recruited for work in export assembly plants along the US–Mexico
border, in East and Southeast Asia, in Silicon Valley, in the Caribbean, and in Central
America. Although the profitability of these multinational factories depends, in part, on
management’s ability to manipulate the young women’s ideologies of gender, the women
do not respond passively or uniformly, but actively resist, challenge, and accommodate. At
the same time, the global dispersion of the assembly line has concentrated corporate facili-
ties in many US cities, making available myriad managerial, administrative, and clerical
jobs for college-educated women. Women’s paid labor is used at various points along this
international system of production. Not only employment but also consumption embod-
ies global interdependencies. There is a high probability that the clothing you are wear-
ing and the computer you use originated in multinational corporate headquarters and in
assembly plants scattered around third world nations. And if these items were actually
manufactured in the United States, they were probably assembled by Latin American and
Asian-born women.
Worldwide, international labor migration and refugee movements are creating new types
of multiracial societies. Although these developments are often discussed and analyzed with
respect to racial differences, gender typically remains absent. As several commentators have
noted, the white feminist movement in the United States has not addressed issues of im-
migration and nationality. Gender, however, has been fundamental in shaping immigration
policies (Chang 1994; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). Direct labor recruitment programs gener-
ally solicit either male or female labor (e.g., Filipina nurses and Mexican male farm workers),
national disenfranchisement has particular repercussions for women and men, and current
6 gender through the prism of difference

immigrant laws are based on very gendered notions of what constitutes “family unifica-
tion.” As Chandra Mohanty suggests, “analytically these issues are the contemporary met-
ropolitan counterpart of women’s struggles against colonial occupation in the geographical
third world” (1991:23). Moreover, immigrant and refugee women’s daily lives often chal-
lenge familiar feminist paradigms. The occupations in which immigrant and refugee women
concentrate—paid domestic work, informal sector street vending, assembly or industrial
piecework performed in the home—often blur the ideological distinction between work and
family and between public and private spheres (Hondagneu-Sotelo2001; Parreñas2001). As
a number of articles in this volume show, immigrant women creatively respond to changes
in work and family brought about through migration, innovating changes in what were once
thought to be stable, fixed sexuality practices and mores.

f r o m pat c h w o r k q u i lt t o p r i s m

All of these developments—the voices of “other” women, the study of men and mascu-
linities, and the examination of gender in transnational contexts—have helped redefine the
study of gender. By working to develop knowledge that is inclusive of the experiences of all
groups, new insights about gender have begun to emerge. Examining gender in the context
of other differences makes it clear that nobody experiences themselves as solely gendered.
Instead, gender is configured through cross-cutting forms of difference that carry deep social
and economic consequences.
By the mid-1980s, thinking about gender had entered a new stage, which was more
carefully grounded in the experiences of diverse groups of women and men. This perspec-
tive is a general way of looking at women and men and understanding their relationships
to the structure of society. Gender is no longer viewed simply as a matter of two opposite
categories of people, males and females, but as a range of social relations among differently
situated people. Because centering on difference is a radical challenge to the conventional
gender framework, it raises several concerns. If we think of all the systems that converge to
simultaneously influence the lives of women and men, we can imagine an infinite number
of effects these interconnected systems have on different women and men. Does the recog-
nition that gender can be understood only contextually (meaning that there is no singular
“gender” per se) make women’s studies and men’s studies newly vulnerable to critics in the
academy? Does the immersion in difference throw us into a whirlwind of “spiraling diver-
sity” (Hewitt 1992:316) whereby multiple identities and locations shatter the categories
“women” and “men”?
Throughout the book, we take a position directly opposed to an empty pluralism.
­Although the categories “woman” and “man” have multiple meanings, this does not reduce
gender to a “postmodern kaleidoscope of lifestyles. Rather, it points to the relational char-
acter of gender” (Connell 1992:736). Not only are masculinity and femininity relational,
but different masculinities and femininities are interconnected through other social structures
such as race, class, and nation. The concept of relationality suggests that “the lives of dif-
ferent groups are interconnected even without face-to-face relations (Glenn 2002:14). The
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had not loved the children with all the devotion he should have or he
would never have had the thoughts he had had—or so he had
reasoned afterward. Yet then as now he suffered because of the love
he should have given them, and had not—and now could not any
more, save in memory. He recalled how both boys looked in those
last sad days, their pinched little faces and small weak hands! Marie
was crushed, and yet dearer for the time being than ever before. But
the two children, once gone, had seemed the victims of his own dark
thoughts as though his own angry, resentful wishes had slain them.
And so, for the time, his mood changed. He wished, if he could, that
he might undo it all, go on as before with Marie, have other children
to replace these lost ones in her affection—but no. It was apparently
not to be, not ever any more.
For, once they were gone, the cords which had held him and Marie
together were weaker, not stronger—almost broken, really. For the
charm which Marie had originally had for him had mostly been
merged in the vivacity and vitality and interest of these two prattling
curly-headed boys. Despite the financial burden, the irritation and
drain they had been at times, they had also proved a binding chain,
a touch of sweetness in the relationship, a hope for the future, a
balance which had kept even this uneven scale. With them present
he had felt that however black the situation it must endure because
of them, their growing interests; with them gone, it was rather plain
that some modification of their old state was possible—just how, for
the moment, he scarcely dared think or wish. It might be that he
could go away and study for awhile now. There was no need of his
staying here. The neighborhood was too redolent now of the
miseries they had endured. Alone somewhere else, perhaps, he
could collect his thoughts, think out a new program. If he went away
he might eventually succeed in doing better by Marie. She could
return to her parents in Philadelphia for a little while and wait for him,
working there at something as she had before until he was ready to
send for her. The heavy load of debts could wait until he was better
able to pay them. In the meantime, also, he could work and whatever
he made over and above his absolute necessities might go to her—
or to clearing off these debts.
 So he had reasoned.
But it had not worked out so of course. No. In the broken mood in
which Marie then was it was not so easy. Plainly, since he had run
across her that April day in Philadelphia when he was wiring for the
great dry goods store, her whole life had become identified with his,
although his had not become merged with hers. No. She was, and
would be, as he could so plainly see, then, nothing without him,
whereas he—he—Well, it had long since been plain that he would be
better off without her—materially, anyhow. But what would she do if
he stayed away a long time—or never came back? What become?
Had he thought of that then? Yes, he had. He had even thought that
once away he might not feel like renewing this situation which had
proved so disastrous. And Marie had seemed to sense that, too. She
was so sad. True he had not thought of all these things in any bold
outright fashion then. Rather they were as sly, evasive shadows
skulking in the remote recesses of his brain, things which scarcely
dared show their faces to the light, although later, once safely away
—they had come forth boldly enough. Only at that time, and later—
even now, he could not help feeling that however much Marie might
have lacked originally, or then, the fault for their might was his,—that
if he himself had not been so dull in the first instance all these black
things would not have happened to him or to her. But could she go
on without him? Would she? he had asked himself then. And
answered that it would be better for him to leave and build himself up
in a different world, and then return and help her later. So he fretted
and reasoned.
But time had solved all that, too. In spite of the fact that he could
not help picturing her back there alone with her parents in
Philadelphia, their poor little cottage in Leigh Street in which she and
her parents had lived—not a cottage either, but a minute little brick
pigeon-hole in one of those long lines of red, treeless, smoky
barracks flanking the great mills of what was known as the
Reffington District, where her father worked—he had gone. He had
asked himself what would she be doing there? What thinking, all
alone without him—the babies dead? But he had gone.
 He recalled so well the day he left her—she to go to Philadelphia,
he to Boston, presumably—the tears, the depression, the
unbelievable sadness in her soul and his. Did she suspect? Did she
foreknow? She was so gentle, even then, so trustful, so sad. “You
will come back to me, dearie, won’t you, soon?” she had said, and so
sadly. “We will be happy yet, won’t we?” she had asked between
sobs. And he had promised. Oh yes; he had done much promising in
his life, before and since. That was one of the darkest things in his
nature, his power of promising.
But had he kept that?
However much in after months and years he told himself that he
wanted to, that he must, that it was only fair, decent, right, still he
had not gone back. No. Other things had come up with the passing
of the days, weeks, months, years, other forces, other interests.
Some plan, person, desire had always intervened, interfered,
warned, counseled, delayed. Were there such counselors? There
had been times during the first year when he had written her and
sent her a little money—money he had needed badly enough
himself. Later there was that long period in which he felt that she
must be getting along well enough, being with her parents and at
work, and he had not written. A second woman had already
appeared on the scene by then as a friend. And then—
The months and years since then in which he had not done so!
After his college course—which he took up after he left Marie,
working his way—he had left Boston and gone to K—— to begin a
career as an assistant plant manager and a developer of ideas of his
own, selling the rights to such things as he invented to the great
company with which he was connected. And then it was that by
degrees the idea of a complete independence and a much greater
life had occurred to him. He found himself so strong, so interesting to
others. Why not be free, once and for all? Why not grow greater?
Why not go forward and work out all the things about which he had
dreamed? The thing from which he had extricated himself was too
confining, too narrow. It would not do to return. The old shell could
not now contain him. Despite her tenderness, Marie was not
significant enough. So—He had already seen so much that he could
do, be, new faces, a new world, women of a higher social level.
But even so, the pathetic little letters which still followed from time
to time—not addressed to him in his new world (she did not know
where he was), but to him in the old one—saying how dearly she
loved him, how she still awaited his return, that she knew he was
having a hard time, that she prayed always, and that all would come
out right yet, that they would be able to be together yet!—she was
working, saving, praying for him! True, he had the excuse that for the
first four years he had not really made anything much, but still he
might have done something for her,—might he not have?—gone
back, persuaded her to let him go, made her comfortable, brought
her somewhat nearer him even? Instead he had feared, feared,
reasoned, argued.
Yes, the then devil of his nature, his ambition, had held him
completely. He was seeing too clearly the wonder of what he might
be, and soon, what he was already becoming. Everything as he
argued then and saw now would have had to be pushed aside for
Marie, whereas what he really desired was that his great career, his
greater days, his fame, the thing he was sure to be now—should
push everything aside. And so—Perhaps he had become sharper,
colder, harder, than he had ever been, quite ready to sacrifice
everything and everybody, or nearly, until he should be the great
success he meant to be. But long before this he might have done so
much. And he had not—had not until very recently decided to revisit
this older, sweeter world.
But in the meantime, as he had long since learned, how the
tragedy of her life had been completed. All at once in those earlier
years all letters had ceased, and time slipping by—ten years really—
he had begun to grow curious. Writing back to a neighbor of hers in
Philadelphia in a disguised hand and on nameless paper, he had
learned that nearly two years before her father had died and that she
and her mother and brother had moved away, the writer could not
say where. Then, five years later, when he was becoming truly
prosperous, he had learned, through a detective agency, that she
and her mother and her ne’er-do-well brother had moved back into
this very neighborhood—this old neighborhood of his and hers!—or,
rather, a little farther out near the graveyard where their two boys
were buried. The simplicity of her! The untutored homing instinct!
But once here, according to what he had learned recently, she and
her mother had not prospered at all. They had occupied the most
minute of apartments farther out, and had finally been compelled to
work in a laundry in their efforts to get along—and he was already so
well-to-do, wealthy, really! Indeed three years before his detectives
had arrived, her mother had died, and two years after that, she
herself, of pneumonia, as had their children. Was it a message from
her that had made him worry at that time? Was that why, only six
months since, although married and rich and with two daughters by
this later marriage, he had not been able to rest until he had found
this out, returned here now to see? Did ghosts still stalk the world?
Yes, to-day he had come back here, but only to realize once and
for all now how futile this errand was, how cruel he had been, how
dreary her latter days must have been in this poor, out-of-the-way
corner where once, for a while at least, she had been happy—he
and she.
“Been happy!”
“By God,” he suddenly exclaimed, a passion of self-reproach and
memory overcoming him, “I can’t stand this! It was not right, not fair. I
should not have waited so long. I should have acted long, long since.
The cruelty—the evil! There is something cruel and evil in it all, in all
wealth, all ambition, in love of fame—too cruel. I must get out! I must
think no more—see no more.”
And hurrying to the door and down the squeaking stairs, he
walked swiftly back to the costly car that was waiting for him a few
blocks below the bridge—that car which was so representative of the
realm of so-called power and success of which he was now the
master—that realm which, for so long, had taken its meaningless
lustre from all that had here preceded it—the misery, the loneliness,
the shadow, the despair. And in it he was whirled swiftly and gloomily
away.
 IX
PHANTOM GOLD

Y OU would have to have seen it to have gathered a true

impression—the stubby roughness of the country, the rocks, the
poverty of the soil, the poorness of the houses, barns, agricultural
implements, horses and cattle and even human beings, in
consequence—especially human beings, for why should they, any
more than any other product of the soil, flourish where all else was
so poor?
It was old Judge Blow who first discovered that “Jack,” or zinc,
was the real riches of Taney, if it could be said to have had any
before “Jack” was discovered. Months before the boom began he
had stood beside a smelter in far-off K—— one late winter afternoon
and examined with a great deal of care the ore which the men were
smelting, marveling at its resemblance to certain rocks or boulders
known as “slug lumps” in his home county.
“What is this stuff?” he asked of one of the bare-armed men who
came out from the blazing furnace after a time to wipe his dripping
face.
“Zinc,” returned the other, as he passed his huge, soiled palm over
his forehead.
“We have stuff down in our county that looks like that,” said the
judge as he turned the dull-looking lump over and considered for a
while. “I’m sure of it—any amount.” Then he became suddenly silent,
for a thought struck him.
“Well, if it’s really ‘Jack,’” said the workman, using the trade or
mining name for it, “there’s money in it, all right. This here comes
from St. Francis.”
The old judge thought of this for a little while and quietly turned
away. He knew where St. Francis was. If this was so valuable that
they could ship it all the way from southeast B——, why not from
Taney? Had he not many holdings in Taney?
The result was that before long a marked if secret change began
to manifest itself in Taney and regions adjacent thereto. Following
the private manipulations and goings to and fro of the judge one or
two shrewd prospectors appeared, and then after a time the whole
land was rife with them. But before that came to pass many a farmer
who had remained in ignorance of the value of his holdings was
rifled of them.
Old Bursay Queeder, farmer and local ne’er-do-well in the
agricultural line, had lived on his particular estate or farm for forty
years, and at the time that Judge Blow was thus mysteriously
proceeding to and fro and here and there upon the earth, did not
know that the rocks against which his pair of extra large feet were
being regularly and bitterly stubbed contained the very wealth of
which he had been idly and rather wistfully dreaming all his life.
Indeed, the earth was a very mysterious thing to Bursay, containing,
as it did, everything he really did not know. This collection of seventy
acres, for instance—which individually and collectively had wrung
more sweat from his brow and more curses from his lips than
anything else ever had—contained, unknown to him, the possibility
of the fulfilment of all his dreams. But he was old now and a little
queer in the head at times, having notions in regard to the Bible,
when the world would come to an end, and the like, although still
able to contend with nature, if not with man. Each day in the spring
and summer and even fall seasons he could be seen on some
portion or other of his barren acres, his stubby beard and sparse hair
standing out roughly, his fingers like a bird’s claws clutching his
plough handles, turning the thin and meagre furrows of his fields and
rattling the stony soil, which had long ceased to yield him even a
modicum of profit. It was a bare living now which he expected, and a
bare living which he received. The house, or cabin, which he
occupied with his wife and son and daughter, was dilapidated
beyond the use or even need of care. The fences were all decayed
save for those which had been built of these same impediments of
the soil which he had always considered a queer kind of stone,
useless to man or beast—a “hendrance,” as he would have said. His
barn was a mere accumulation of patchboards, shielding an old
wagon and some few scraps of machinery. And the alleged corn crib
was so aged and lopsided that it was ready to fall. Weeds and
desolation, bony horses and as bony children, stony fields and thin
trees, and withal solitude and occasional want—such was the world
of his care and his ruling.
Mrs. Queeder was a fitting mate for the life to which he was
doomed. It had come to that pass with her that the monotony of
deprivation was accepted with indifference. The absence or
remoteness of even a single modest school, meeting house or town
hall, to say nothing of convenient neighbors, had left her and hers all
but isolated. She was irascible, cantankerous, peculiar; her voice
was shrill and her appearance desolate. Queeder, whom she
understood or misunderstood thoroughly, was a source of comfort in
one way—she could “nag at him,” as he said, and if they quarreled
frequently it was in a fitting and harmonious way. Amid such a
rattletrap of fields and fences bickering was to be expected.
“Why don’t yuh take them thar slug lumps an’ make a fence over
thar?” she asked of Queeder for something like the thousandth time
in ten years, referring to as many as thirty-five piles of the best and
almost pure zinc lying along the edges of the nearest field, and piled
there by Bursay,—this time because two bony cows had invaded one
of their corn patches. The “slug lumps” to which she referred could
not have been worth less than $2,000.
For as many as the thousandth time he had replied:
“Well, fer the land sakes, hain’t I never got nuthin’ else tuh do?
Yuh’d think them thar blame-ding rocks wuz wuth more nor anythin’
else. I do well enough ez ’tis to git ’em outen the sile, I say, ‘thout
tryin’ tuh make fences outen ’em.”
“So yuh say—yuh lazy, good-fer-nuthin’ ole tobacco-chewin’ ——,”
here a long list of expletives which was usually succeeded by a
stove lid or poker or a fair-sized stick of wood, propelled by one party
or the other, and which was as deftly dodged. Love and family
affection, you see, due to unbroken and unbreakable propinquity, as
it were.
But to proceed: The hot and rainy seasons had come and gone in
monotonous succession during a period of years, and the lumps still
lay in the field. Dode, the eldest child and only son—a huge, hulking,
rugged and yet bony ignoramus, who had not inherited an especially
delicate or agreeable disposition from his harried parents—might
have removed them had he not been a “consarned lazy houn’,” his
father said, or like his father, as his mother said, and Jane, the
daughter, might have helped, but these two partook of the same
depressed indifference which characterized the father. And why not,
pray? They had worked long, had had little, seen less and hoped for
no particular outlet for their lives in the future, having sense enough
to know that if fate had been more kind there might have been.
Useless contention with an unyielding soil had done its best at
hardening their spirits.
“I don’t see no use ploughin’ the south patch,” Dode had now
remarked for the third time this spring. “The blamed thing don’t grow
nuthin’.”
“Ef yuh only half ’tended it instid o’ settin’ out thar under them thar
junipers pickin’ yer teeth an’ meditatin’, mebbe ’twould,” squeaked
Mrs. Queeder, always petulant or angry or waspish—a nature soured
by long and hopeless and useless contention.
“No use shakin’ up a lot uv rocks, ez I see,” returned Dode, wearily
and aimlessly slapping at a fly. “The hull place ain’t wuth a hill o’
beans,” and from one point of view he was right.
“Why don’t yuh git off’n hit then?” suggested Queeder in a
tantalizing voice, with no particular desire to defend the farm, merely
with an idle wish to vary the monotony. “Ef hit’s good enough tuh
s’port yuh, hit’s good enough to work on, I say.”
“S’port!” sniffed the undutiful Dode, wearily, and yet humorously
and scornfully. “I ain’t seed much s’port, ez I kin remember. Mebbe
ye’re thinkin’ uv all the fine schoolin’ I’ve had, er the places I’ve
been.” He slapped at another fly.
 Old Queeder felt the sneer, but as he saw it it was scarcely his
fault. He had worked. At the same time he felt the futility of
quarreling with Dode, who was younger and stronger and no longer,
owing to many family quarrels, bearing him any filial respect. As a
matter of fact it was the other way about. From having endured many
cuffs and blows in his youth Dode was now much the more powerful
physically, and in any contest could easily outdo his father; and
Queeder, from at first having ruled and seen his word law, was now
compelled to take second, even third and fourth, place, and by
contention and all but useless snarling gain the very little
consideration that he received.
But in spite of all this they lived together indifferently. And day after
day—once Judge Blow had returned to Taney—time was bringing
nearer and nearer the tide of mining and the amazing boom that
went with it. Indeed every day, like a gathering storm cloud, it might
have been noted by the sensitive as approaching closer and closer,
only these unwitting holders were not sensitive. They had not the
slightest inkling as yet of all that was to be. Here in this roadless,
townless region how was one to know. Prospectors passed to the
north and the south of them; but as yet none had ever come directly
to this wonderful patch upon which Queeder and his family rested. It
was in too out-of-the-way a place—a briary, woodsy, rocky corner.
Then one sunny June morning—
“Hi, thar!” called Cal Arnold, their next neighbor, who lived some
three miles further on, who now halted his rickety wagon and bony
horses along the road opposite the field in which Queeder was
working. “Hyur the news?” He spoke briskly, shifting his cud of
tobacco and eyeing Queeder with the chirpiness of one who brings
diverting information.
“No; what?” asked Queeder, ceasing his “cultivating” with a worn
one-share plough and coming over and leaning on his zinc fence,
rubbing a hand through his sparse hair the while.
“Ol’ Dunk Porter down here to Newton’s sold his farm,” replied Cal,
shrewdly and jubilantly, as though he were relating the tale of a great
battle or the suspected approach of the end of the world. “An’ he got
three thousan’ dollars fer it.” He rolled the sum deliciously under his
tongue.
“Yuh don’t say!” said Queeder quietly but with profound and
amazed astonishment. “Three thousan’?” He stirred as one who
hears of the impossible being accomplished and knows it can’t be
true. “Whut fer?”
“They ’low now ez how thar’s min’l onto it,” went on the farmer
wisely. “They ’low ez how now this hyur hull kentry round hyur is
thick an’ spilin’ with it. Hit’s uvrywhar. They tell me ez how these hyur
slug lumps”—and he flicked at one of the large piles of hitherto
worthless zinc against which Queeder was leaning—“is this hyur
min’l—er ‘Jack,’ ez they call hit—an’ that hit’s wuth two cents a
pound when it’s swelted” (“smelted,” he meant) “an’ even more. I see
yuh got quite a bit uv hit. So’ve I. Thar’s a lot layin’ down around my
place. I allus ’lowed ez how ’twant wuth much o’ anythin,’ but they
say ’tis. I hyur from some o’ the boys ’at’s been to K—— that when
hit’s fixed up, swelted and like o’ that, that hit’s good fer lots of
things.”
He did not know what exactly, so he did not stop to explain.
Instead he cocked a dreamful eye, screwed up his mouth
preparatory to expectorating and looked at Queeder. The latter,
unable to adjust his thoughts to this new situation, picked up a piece
of the hitherto despised “slug” and looked at it. To think that through
all these years of toil and suffering he should have believed it
worthless and now all of a sudden it was worth two cents a pound
when “swelted” and that neighbors were beginning to sell their farms
for princely sums!—and his farm was covered with this stuff, this
gold almost! Why, there were whole hummocks of it raising slaty-
gray backs to the hot sun further on, a low wall in one place where it
rose sheer out of the ground on this “prupetty,” as he always referred
to it. Think of that! Think of that! But although he thought much he
said nothing, for in his starved and hungry brain was beginning to
sprout and flourish a great and wondrous idea. He was to have
money, wealth—ease, no less! Think of it! Not to toil and sweat in the
summer sun any more, to loaf and dream at his ease, chew all the
tobacco he wished, live in town, visit far-off, mysterious K——, see
all there was to see!
“Well, I guess I’ll be drivin’ on,” commented Arnold after a time,
noting Queeder’s marked abstraction. “I cal’late tuh git over tuh
Bruder’s an’ back by sundown. He’s got a little hay I traded him a pig
fer hyur a while back,” and he flicked his two bony horses and was
off up the rubbly, dusty road.
For a time Queeder was scarcely satisfied to believe his senses.
Was it really true? Had Porter really sold his place? For days
thereafter, although he drove to Arno—sixteen miles away—to
discover the real truth, he held his own counsel, nursing a wonderful
fancy. This property was his, not his wife’s, nor his two children’s.
Years before he had worked and paid for it, a few lone dollars at a
time, or their equivalent in corn, pigs, wheat, before he had married.
Now—now—soon one of those strange creatures—a “prowspector,”
Arnold had called him—who went about with money would come
along and buy up his property. Wonderful! Wonderful! What would he
get for it?—surely five thousand dollars, considering that Porter had
received three for forty acres, whereas he had seventy. Four
thousand, anyhow—a little more than Dunk. He could not figure it
very well, but it would be more than Dunk’s, whatever it was—
probably five thousand!
The one flaw in all this though—and it was a great flaw—was the
thought of his savage and unkindly family—the recalcitrant Dode, the
angular Jane and his sour better half, Emma—who would now
probably have to share in all this marvelous prosperity, might even
take it away from him and push him into that background where he
had been for so long. They were so much more dogmatic, forceful
than he. He was getting old, feeble even, from long years of toil. His
wife had done little this long time but sneer and jeer at him, as he
now chose most emphatically to remember; his savage son the
same. Jane, the indifferent, who looked on him as a failure and a
ne’er-do-well, had done nothing but suggest that he work harder.
Love, family tenderness, family unity—if these had ever existed they
had long since withered in the thin, unnourishing air of this rough,
poverty-stricken world. What did he owe any of them? Nothing. And
now they would want to share in all this, of course. Having lived so
long with them, and under such disagreeable conditions, he now
wondered how they would dare suggest as much, and still he knew
they would. Fight him, nag him, that’s all they had ever done. But
now that wealth was at his door they would be running after him,
fawning upon him—demanding it of him, perhaps! What should he
do? How arrange for all of this?—for wealth was surely close to his
hands. It must be. Like a small, half-intelligent rat he peeked and
perked. His demeanor changed to such an extent that even his
family noticed it and began to wonder, although (knowing nothing of
all that had transpired as yet) they laid it to the increasing queerness
of age.
“Have yuh noticed how Pap acts these hyur days?” Dode inquired
of Jane and his mother one noontime after old Queeder had eaten
and returned to the fields. “He’s all the time standin’ out thar at the
fence lookin’ aroun’ ez if he wuz a-waitin’ fer somebody er thinkin’
about somepin. Mebbe he’s gittin’ a little queer, huh? Y’ think so?”
Dode was most interested in anything which concerned his father
—or, rather, his physical or mental future—for once he died this
place would have to be divided or he be called upon to run it, and in
that case he would be a fitting catch for any neighborhood farming
maiden, and as such able to broach and carry through the long-
cherished dream of matrimony, now attenuated and made all but
impossible by the grinding necessities he was compelled to endure.
“Yes, I’ve been noticin’ somepin,” returned Mrs. Queeder. “He
hain’t the same ez he wuz a little while back. Some new notion he’s
got into his mind, I reckon, somepin he wants tuh do an’ kain’t, er
somepin new in ’ligion, mebbe. Yuh kain’t ever tell whut’s botherin’
him.”
Jane “’lowed” as much and the conversation ended. But still
Queeder brooded, trying to solve the knotty problem, which
depended, of course, on the open or secret sale of the land—secret,
if possible, he now finally decided, seeing that his family had always
been so unkind to him. They deserved nothing better. It was his—
why not?
 In due time appeared a prospector, mounted on horseback and
dressed for rough travel, who, looking over the fields of this area and
noting the value of these particular acres, the surface outcropping of
a thick vein, became intensely interested. Queeder was not to be
seen at the time, having gone to some remote portion of the farm,
but Mrs. Queeder, wholly ignorant of the value of the land and
therefore of the half-suppressed light in the stranger’s eye, greeted
him pleasantly enough.
“Would you let me have a drink of water?” inquired the stranger
when she appeared at the door.
“Sartinly,” she replied with a tone of great respect. Even
comparatively well-dressed strangers were so rare here.
Old Queeder in a distant field observing him at the well, now
started for the house.
“What is that stuff you make your fences out of?” asked the
stranger agreeably, wondering if they knew.
“Well, now, I dunno,” said Mrs. Queeder. “It’s some kind o’ stone, I
reckon—slug lumps, we uns always call hit aroun’ hyur.”
The newcomer suppressed a desire to smile and stooped to pick
up a piece of the zinc with which the ground was scattered. It was
the same as he had seen some miles back, only purer and present
in much greater quantities. Never had he seen more and better zinc
near the surface. It was lying everywhere exposed, cultivation, frosts
and rains having denuded it, whereas in the next county other men
were digging for it. The sight of these dilapidated holdings, the
miserable clothing, old Queeder toiling out in the hot fields, and all
this land valueless for agriculture because of its wondrous mineral
wealth, was almost too much for him.
“Do you own all this land about here?” he inquired.
“’Bout seventy acres,” returned Mrs. Queeder.
“Do you know what it sells at an acre?”
“No. It ain’t wuth much, though, I reckon. I ain’t heerd o’ none bein’
sold aroun’ hyur fer some time now.”
 The prospector involuntarily twitched at the words “not wuth
much.” What would some of his friends and rivals say if they knew of
this particular spot? What if some one should tell these people? If he
could buy it now for a song, as he well might! Already other
prospectors were in the neighborhood. Had he not eaten at the same
table at Arno with three whom he suspected as such? He must get
this, and get it now.
“I guess I’ll stroll over and talk to your husband a moment,” he
remarked and ambled off, the while Mrs. Queeder and Jane, the
twain in loose blue gingham bags of dresses much blown by the
wind, stood in the tumbledown doorway and looked after him.
“Funny, ain’t he?” said the daughter. “Wonder whut he wants o’
Paw?”
Old Queeder looked up quizzically from his ploughing, to which he
had returned, as he saw the stranger approaching, and now
surveyed him doubtfully as he offered a cheery “Good morning.”
“Do you happen to know if there is any really good farming land
around here for sale?” inquired the prospector after a few delaying
comments about the weather.
“Air yuh wantin’ it fer farmin’?” replied Queeder cynically and
casting a searching look upon the newcomer, who saw at once by
Queeder’s eye that he knew more than his wife. “They’re buyin’ hit
now mostly fer the min’l ez is onto it, ez I hyur.” At the same time he
perked like a bird to see how this thrust had been received.
The prospector smiled archly if wisely. “I see,” he said. “You think
it’s good for mining, do you? What would you hold your land at as
mineral land then if you had a chance to sell it?”
Queeder thought for a while. Two wood doves cooed mournfully in
the distance and a blackbird squeaked rustily before he answered.
“I dunno ez I keer tuh sell yit.” He had been getting notions of late
as to what might be done if he were to retain his land, bid it up
against the desires of one and another, only also the thought of how
his wife and children might soon learn and insist on dividing the
profits with him if he did sell it was haunting him. Those dreams of
getting out in the world and seeing something, of getting away from
his family and being happy in some weird, free way, were actually
torturing him.
“Who owns the land just below here, then?” asked the stranger,
realizing that his idea of buying for little or nothing might as well be
abandoned. But at this Queeder winced. For after all, the land
adjoining had considerable mineral on it also, as he well knew.
“Why, let me see,” he replied waspishly, with mingled feelings of
opposition and indifference. “Marradew,” he finally added, grudgingly.
It was no doubt true that this stranger or some other could buy of
other farmers if he refused to sell. Still, land around here anywhere
must be worth something, his as much as any other. If Dunk Porter
had received $3,000—
“If you don’t want to sell, I suppose he might,” the prospector
continued pleasantly. The idea was expressed softly, meditatively,
indifferently almost.
There was a silence, in which Queeder calmly leaned on his
plough handles thinking. The possibility of losing this long-awaited
opportunity was dreadful. But he was not floored yet, for all his
hunger and greed. Arnold had said that the metal alone, these rocks,
was worth two cents a pound, and he could not get it out of his mind
that somehow the land itself, the space of soil aside from the metal,
must be worth something. How could it be otherwise? Small crops of
sorts grew on it.
“I dunno,” he replied defiantly, if internally weakly. “Yuh might ast. I
ain’t heerd o’ his wantin’ to sell.” He was determined to risk this last if
he had to run after the stranger afterward and beg him to
compromise, although he hoped not to have to do that, either. There
were other prospectors.
“I don’t know yet whether I want this,” continued the prospector
heavily and with an air of profound indifference, “but I’d like to have
an option on it, if you’d like to sell. What’ll you take for an option at
sixty days on the entire seventy acres?”
 The worn farmer did not in the least understand what was meant
by the word option, but he was determined not to admit it. “Whut’ll
yuh give?” he asked finally, in great doubt as to what to say.
“Well, how about $200 down and $5,000 more at the end of sixty
days if we come to terms at the end of that time?” He was offering
the very lowest figure that he imagined Queeder would take, if any,
for he had heard of other sales in this vicinity this very day.
Queeder, not knowing what an option was, knew not what to say.
Five thousand was what he had originally supposed he might be
offered, but sixty days! What did he mean by that? Why not at once if
he wanted the place—cash—as Dunk Porter, according to Arnold,
had received? He eyed the stranger feverishly, fidgeted with his
plough handles, and finally observed almost aimlessly: “I ’low ez I
could git seven thousan’ any day ef I wanted to wait. The feller hyur
b’low me a ways got three thousan’, an’ he’s got thirty acres less’n I
got. Thar’s been a feller aroun’ hyur offerin’ me six thousan’.”
“Well, I might give you $6,000, providing I found the ground all
right,” he said.
“Cash down?” asked Queeder amazedly, kicking at a clod.
“Within sixty days,” answered the prospector.
“Oh!” said Queeder, gloomily. “I thort yuh wanted tuh buy t’day.”
“Oh, no,” said the other. “I said an option. If we come to terms I’ll
be back here with the money within sixty days or before, and we’ll
close the thing up—six thousand in cash, minus the option money.
Of course I don’t bind myself absolutely to buy—just get the privilege
of buying at any time within sixty days, and if I don’t come back
within that time the money I turn over to you to-day is yours, see,
and you’re free to sell the land to some one else.”
“Huh!” grunted Queeder. He had dreamed of getting the money at
once and making off all by himself, but here was this talk of sixty
days, which might mean something or nothing.
“Well,” said the prospector, noting Queeder’s dissatisfaction and
deciding that he must do something to make the deal seem more
attractive, “suppose we say seven thousand, then, and I put down
$500 cash into your hands now? How’s that? Seven thousand in
sixty days and five hundred in cash right now. What do you say?”
He reached in his pocket and extracted a wallet thick with bills,
which excited Queeder greatly. Never had so much ready money,
which he might quickly count as his if he chose, been so near him.
After all, $500 in cash was an amazing amount in itself. With that
alone what could he not do? And then the remainder of the seven
thousand within sixty days! Only, there were his wife and two
children to consider. If he was to carry out his dream of decamping
there must be great secrecy. If they learned of this—his possession
of even so much as five hundred in cash—what might not happen?
Would not Dode or his wife or Jane, or all three, take it away from
him—steal it while he was asleep? It might well be so. He was so
silent and puzzled that the stranger felt that he was going to reject
his offer.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said, as though he were making a
grand concession. “I’ll make it eight thousand and put up eight
hundred. How’s that? If we can’t arrange it on that basis we’ll have to
drop the matter, for I can’t offer to pay any more,” and at that he
returned the wallet to his pocket.
But Queeder still gazed, made all but dumb by his good fortune
and the difficulties it presented. Eight thousand! Eight hundred in
cash down! He could scarcely understand.
“T’day?” he asked.
“Yes, to-day—only you’ll have to come with me to Arno. I want to
look into your title. Maybe you have a deed, though—have you?”
Queeder nodded.
“Well, if it’s all right I’ll pay you the money at once. I have a form of
agreement here and we can get some one to witness it, I suppose.
Only we’ll have to get your wife to sign, too.”
Queeder’s face fell. Here was the rub—his wife and two children!
“She’s gotta sign, hez she?” he inquired grimly, sadly even. He was
beside himself with despair, disgust. To work and slave so all these
years! Then, when a chance came, to have it all come to nothing, or
nearly so!
“Yes,” said the prospector, who saw by his manner and tone that
his wife’s knowledge of it was not desired. “We’ll have to get her
signature, too. I’m sorry if it annoys you, but the law compels it.
Perhaps you could arrange all that between you in some way. Why
not go over and talk to her about it?”
Queeder hesitated. How he hated it—this sharing with his wife and
son! He didn’t mind Jane so much. But now if they heard of it they
would quarrel with him and want the larger share. He would have to
fight—stand by his “rights.” And once he had the money—if he ever
got it—he would have to watch it, hide it, to keep it away from them.
“What’s the matter?” asked the prospector, noting his perturbation.
“Does she object to your selling?”
“’Tain’t that. She’ll sell, well enough, once she hyurs. I didn’t ’low
ez I’d let ’er know at fust. She’ll be wantin’ the most uv it—her an’
Dode—an’ hit ain’t ther’n, hit’s mine. I wuz on hyur fust. I owned this
hyur place fust, ’fore ever I saw ’er. She don’t do nuthin’ but fuss an’
fight, ez ’tis.”
“Supposing we go over to the house and talk to her. She may not
be unreasonable. She’s only entitled to a third, you know, if you don’t
want to give her more than that. That’s the law. That would leave you
nearly five thousand. In fact, if you want it, I’ll see that you get five
thousand whatever she gets.” He had somehow gathered the
impression that five thousand, for himself, meant a great deal to
Queeder.
And true enough, at that the old farmer brightened a little. For five
thousand? Was not that really more than he had expected to get for
the place as a whole but an hour before! And supposing his wife did
get three thousand? What of it? Was not his own dream coming
true? He agreed at once and decided to accompany the prospector
to the house. But on the way the farmer paused and gazed about
him. He was as one who scarcely knew what he was doing. All this
money—this new order of things—if it went through! He felt strange,
different, confused. The mental ills of his many years plus this great
fortune with its complications and possibilities were almost too much
for him. The stranger noted a queer metallic and vacant light in the
old farmer’s eyes as he now turned slowly about from west to east,
staring.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, a suspicion of insanity coming to
him.
The old man seemed suddenly to come to. “’Tain’t nuthin’,” he
said. “I wuz just thinkin’.”
The prospector meditated on the validity of a contract made with a
lunatic, but the land was too valuable to bother about trifles. Once a
contract was made, even with a half-wit, the legal difficulties which
could be made over any attempt to break the agreement would be
very great.
In the old cabin Jane and her mother wondered at the meaning of
the approaching couple, but old Queeder shooed off the former as
he would have a chicken. Once inside the single room, which served
as parlor, sitting-room, bedroom and all else convenient, Queeder
nervously closed the door leading into the kitchen, where Jane had
retired.
“Go on away, now,” he mumbled, as he saw her there hanging
about. “We want a word with yer Maw, I tell yuh.”
Lank Jane retired, but later clapped a misshapen ear to the door
until she was driven away by her suspicious father. Then the farmer
began to explain to his wife what it was all about.
“This hyur stranger—I don’t know your name yit—”
“Crawford! Crawford!” put in the prospector.
“Crawford—Mr. Crawford—is hyur tuh buy the place ef he kin. I
thought, seein’ ez how yuh’ve got a little int’est in it—third”—he was
careful to add—“we’d better come an’ talk tuh yuh.”
“Int’est!” snapped Mrs. Queeder, sharply and suspiciously, no
thought of the presence of the stranger troubling her in her
expression of her opinion, “I should think I had—workin’ an’ slavin’